Dear FLARE21 Youth Platform Members,

14 th June proved to be the biggest day for our Declaration being disseminated at its higher level in Georgia! Student Participation was utterly encouraged and Culture section was promoted!

Grand presentation of the Declaration of the European Students for Legality and Declaration of Defending Cultural heritage together with the presentation of students’ topics, researches and thesis statements executed on its purposes.

Here are the photos not only from the Closing Ceremony, but also from the very first steps taken at the national Level. 

The Closing Ceremony was being transmitted by the Local TV and I when being asked by the Journalist I provided General information about our Declaration and FLARE. In connection herewith, I would like to mention that I was granted diploma for the conducted circle of the events. 
Expressing gratitude to all of you, FLARE members and hoping to meet you in order to commit ourselves for more bigger task...

Dear FLARE21 Youth Platform Members,

Within the framework of the Declaration of the European Students for Legality, International Fund for Sustainable Development in Tbilisi, in collaboration with ‘Defend Georgia’, took up youth initiative to defend Georgian alphabet book- referring to educational right. To recall the words from our declaration, in order to “collectively, in one voice, stand for respect, protection and fulfillment of the general principles of legality within Higher Education Institutions” and to highlight “the significance of student participation in decision making processes”.

Participation and Culture sections from our Declaration were introduced to Students from various Higher University Institutions, Tbilisi State University, Kutaisi State University, Georgian Technical University, Ilia Chavchavadze University, Art Academy and so many private ones. I would like to inform you that the Georgian Young Lawyers drafted the other declaration dated 14^th April of the year of 2011, Tbilisi.  Where we stated that we take into consideration,

        I.            “UNESCO’s official announcements and conclusions that diverse linguistic and cultural values throughout the world are facing the threat of intolerance, grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction;

      II.            Georgian scientists’ and public figures’ recognition that Iakob Gogebashvili’s “Deda ena” is the discovery, finding of the era,  unique method, mode, with which common pedagogical aim was reflected in the oral traditions and in the forms of expression and itself it is the practice accumulated for years.”

We, according to our declaration ask for “Encouragement of the debate and engagement on current affairs”; we seek for, as we emphasized in the culture section, and demand from institutions, local, national and European government to – 'Grant support for cultural activities. 

Remember what we indicated about so called promoting Civic Culture?  It should be enhanced to help youth to think critically and to be active in encouraging improvement.” 

In order to promote Civic Culture, the Georgian Students decided to organize Conference Cycle sessions which close with Young Scientists’ effort on the 14^th of June, 2011.

On the 14^th we will have Grand presentation of the Declaration of the European Students for Legality and Declaration of Defending Cultural heritage together with the presentation of students’ topics, researches and thesis statements.

Just wanted to let you know how useful our declaration proves to be and inform you that it will be disseminated at the higher level in Georgia.

As the chief of the whole project I will do my best to execute on the purposes of these two declarations by “Raising awareness and distributing information to emphasize the importance and necessity of active student participation”.

 

P.s. I will for sure share the photos with you.

“We’ve Developed a Blame Culture Around Here and I Want to Know Who’s Responsible!!!

Instead of Introduction or Let it be Intro: In the year of 2007, November, our University was hosting German Professor. I had an honor to attend the meeting together with the Rector of Tbilisi State University and give the guest brief talk and speedy walk through the busy halls full of students pretty overburdened with backbreaking books. It was me who nonverbally celebrated the happiness of delightful impression  bestowal (our university-students’ willingness to aspire education) on the guest, who all of a sudden suspended marching and scattered his look over the Resource Center; for more clearance, I can confidently say that it is an ordinary auditorium with transparent windows and with a number of approximately 200 computers with internet access, on the left side of the Information Desk at the entrance of the University’s II building, belonging to the Law Faculty Sector. The German Professor, after ogling and blinking with fatigued eyes, probably tired of staring the same site with abundant number of students carefully glowering at the computer screen and pressingly tapping on the keyboard, turned to me and ceremoniously announced: “You are rich, very rich nation, dear!” I nodded in the utter confirmation though my personal presumption was not in compliance with his assessment about our nation. Probably my acquiescence was due to the fact that I saw emerging head from the remote corner of the corridor of the sightseeing guide and, in order to avoid losing him from the eyesight, I immediately headed to that direction. After my responsibility taking care of the guest was transferred to the Guide, peacefully, my mind automatically floated back to the sentence ‘sentencing’ that we are the rich nation and assumed from the five minute look on the Resource Center.  My intolerable nature towards unanswered questions brought me to draw up several assumptions; the Resource center attracted the attention of the German Guest since a) there were considerable number of students being in the resource center while it was the morning lectures session still running; b) Georgia is a developing country and disregarding its financial difficulties government can still equip universities with such expensive technique. c) It was the only place in the ancient Georgian University where he felt modernizing power of the 21^st century and its incentive to combine studying together with Internet Research, and relevantly, everything already seen seemed out-of-date in comparison with this place.  However, none of my harbored thought seemed to be truly credible to me since they failed to be explanatory for the evaluation of the Georgians as the rich people! 

***

A year later, in 2008 Georgia experienced sour adventure but the core concern of mine lies within the fact that it still continues its way blindfold. To note in connection herewith, I am apolitical, independent-thinking individual who recalls the following story to demonstrate how much further can the Internet negligence and illiteracy may lead. It was not only military armed conflict that Georgia loose with Russia, but in the long run it can be evaluated as the cyber war accompanied by military bombardment. The government websites have been hacked into, blocking visitors from accessing the sites. The Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was one of the first websites to be targeted using a suspected ‘denial of service’ attack, whereby websites were bombarded with millions of hits causing them to falter and crash. The Ministry of Defense and the central government site, together with some private commercial institutions web-sites remained down. The website of the National Bank of Georgia has also been compromised. According to the official sources, “malicious visits were outnumbering legitimate ones 5000 to 1”. “The Russian hackers launched waves of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the websites. This means that their computers and the computers of unsuspecting people whose home systems they have hacked and enlisted for their "botnet", or swarm of zombie computers, were directed to simultaneously flood a chosen site with thousands of visits in order to overload it and bring it offline. Tom Burling, from Tulip Systems, which began hosting the President's site on its servers in Atlanta after it was brought down by the hackers, said his company had become the latest target of a flood of bogus traffic sent from Russia to crash the sites.”

The Georgian conflict is now believed to have taken an electronic turn with official government web sites having been hacked and brought down according to McAfee.  According to McAfee security analysts, cyber attacks are used as weapons together with physical attacks. More to the point, the pros of such kind of method is the fact that no one is directly physically hurt or killed and it is much harder to pinpoint the source and who is involved. It proves to be less expensive than full scale military attack still creating maximum levels of destruction. Since the internet plays an important role in the running of countries and can be detrimental to the country’s economy, with the severe impact on the running services ‘governments need to have in place strategies to prepare for this type of attack and to ensure that resources can be sustained at all times’.  

Though there are marked similarities between this and the attacks on Estonia in 2007, I am not going to judge or analyze who did what. I put the special emphasis on ‘study on mistakes tactics’.

May be the opposing country is a way too powerful, but as the coin has two sides, let ourselves ponder about that may be it is we who were very weak at that stage!

It turned out that Georgia economized its revenue on heightening its Internet security level and this short-sighted policy proved to be twice as costly as supposed.

 Though it was predicted that a rise in international cyber espionage would pose the single biggest threat to national security in 2008, Georgia did not take it seriously. Reports foresaw that governments and allied groups would use the Internet to launch cyber attacks targeting critical national infrastructure network systems such as electricity, air traffic control, financial markets and government computer networks. In this case, we face the problem of ignorance of the nations, governmental institutions to whom the country’s external and internal security proves to be of utter importance. 

I agree with Mr. Tan (The report on the third edition of McAfee's Virtual Criminology, published in November 2007), that “it is impossible to stop all cyber attacks, but with heightened network security — and a strong contingency plan — businesses and societies can minimize their impact and remain resilient in this new era of cyber risks and threats”.

While we revealed state’s irresponsible actions (particularly, Georgia’s) it’s time to move on separate individuals. As a standard practice, the conscious of Nation is appeased until the matter refers to them individually. There can hardly be found the nation in today’s world who believes that Internet is like water gushing from the tap called ‘Worldwide web’. This kind of distorted perception leads Georgian society to the dire consequences. The public awareness is at a low level, the digital life riding ‘freewill’ is longer guaranteeing the goodwill of those others involved. Putting the Facebook status on does bring a feeling of ‘social importance and satisfaction’, but one needs to think twice about the significance of its personal life details which goes downstream without the trace and you never know where it emerges.

Why human brains are so called “secure”? Sensory physiology defines that storage of information is the process we call memory. To evaluate, it is not the brain which is secure, it is memory within- genuine storehouse which is secure. So if willing to achieve security one needs to know inner state, superficial observation can be deceptive. On the surface everything can be smooth, when inside the system alarms to change.

As a result, in Georgia, the field of social media, digital life rides uncontrolled. Internet governance does not exist neither data privacy is guaranteed; we have developed so called “a Blame Culture” since the responsibility for cyber-bulling, posting defamatory statements, infringing upon the IP Rights lies on no one, but everyone. Relevantly, the legislation governing this field is weak, non-enforceable and overall, this field is full of mazes if it is not a real minefield.

To the chagrin of the community I belong to only a few is awake and feels like I feel right now – “a snail without a shell.” We do not have shell, shield when accessing web. No rights defended, no privacy guaranteed.

Continuing the so-called “ostrich tactics” of burying the head in the sand when in danger is the way to go, can and will be lethal for the upcoming future.  What came to my mind now are the lyrics from the famous song “Is it yours? Is it mine? Is it ours? Sunset, sunrise.”  Sunset or Sunrise can be mine, yours and ours but your life and digital life belongs to you, and only you!

                                                                     

***

It was a year after I submitted e-mail to the German Professor asking the question about his assessment a year ago (how ridiculous it is) and giving my own explanation for his announcement.

“Did you think that there was authorized software installed and secured driver downloaded in every single of them? “_I spurred.  

“Of course I did.

  Oh, was not it?”- was the answer after the slight hesitation.

 If only it was even now!

©2011ninojajanidze all rights reserved

The Art of Staying Private on the Public Domain

From the standpoint of pure psychology ‘I’, ‘myself, ‘my’ and ‘mine’ are those magic words which one can solely say about himself or herself.   The power of the word ‘mine’, highlighting the possessive nature of the relationship, nowadays can only be felt when tangible things are the objects and that’s lamentable. That digital life you live knows no I, me, myself, neither mine and I urge you not to be too naive to believe that your attitude is unfair since it is Holy Social Media you benefit from. No, this is holy social media which you benefit from and which benefits from you, but in currently existing cases and with current examples, with invisible horns.

This is not one of those “did you know this” or “every user needs to know that” article, since the problem lies within that we know, we do already know but still hate or frown to read or even peep what is going in the e-paper of privacy settings before we press “I agree” button. One needs to emphasize that we do not decide to press that button, but prefer to press it immediately as popped out in the separate window and apparently seen on our screens.  This kind of Ignoring Ignore Button Policy will definitely lead us to dire consequences giving rise to the disappearance of our digital identity, or even worse, resulting in utter display of our personal, so called sensitive information.

The Internet is a public domain and many of us are moving in the cyber space just like bewildered tourist wonders distractedly in the ‘terra incognita’.  What does the latter one need to move not only in the right direction (because as a newcomer he/she does not know yet where to go and for sure, needs to avoid troubles on their way) but to move in any direction at all? At least so much-needed map. Unfortunately, we were not lucky enough to owe such kind of indicative document to help us from the very beginning and as a standard practice we commenced to study on our mistakes and each other’s experiences. Well, that sounds clear-sighted and long-headed route to follow but in the long run it has facilitated to develop and implement so called ‘Ignorance culture’ within ‘global village’ inhabitants when interacting with computers, using the Internet, affiliating social networks.

Social media is genuinely global, covering blogs and micro-blogs, social networking sites, collaborative projects, content communities, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds, each of them including Location-based social networks ( Foursquare, Geoloqi, Gowalla, Facebook places, The Hotlist), Events ( Eventful, The Hotlist, Meetup.com, Upcoming), Online Advocacy and Fundraising (Causes, Kickstarte), Blogging (Blogger, Expression Engine, Live Journal, Open Diary, Type Pad, Vox, Word Press), Microblogging( FMyLife, Foursquare, Jaiku, Plurk, Posterous, Tumblr, Twitter, Qaiku, Google Buzz, Identi.ca Nasza-Klasa), Information Aggregators ( Netvibes, Twine), Social networking( ASmallWorld, Bebo, Cyworld, Diaspora, Facebook, Hi5, Hyves, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Plaxo, Tagged, XING , IRC, Yammer)and all these services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.

Overall, all roads lead to Social Networking. Quite very often people are misled when thinking that when it comes to social networking the only way out in order to maintain your privacy is - Not To Be Social. Privacy is envisioned as the right; to me, personally, privacy is the right, which has become a privilege. If the Social media gives you genuine privacy (guaranteeing static terms and conditions, not as frequently changing rules as the weekly newspaper, charter of principles, precise regulations, terms of service, secure databases and prevent you from third party applications and plug-ins) then consider yourself to be lavishly granted by the overgenerous cyber-friend; because such an opportunity does exist, though can be found at a premium.

For those born after 1991, computers’ and Internet’s usage seems like luxury for ages but still as the technological evolution goes forward public awareness level declines and relevantly, the gaps of ignorance are widening.

As for aftermath proposed, it is nothing more than a fresh-eyed look of one of the curious individual born in the year of 1990 revealing sweat myths told and displaying sour reality encountered.

Myth: Anyways, your privacy is guaranteed on social networking sites.

Reality:  Anyways, your privacy is not guaranteed on the majority of the social networking sites.

The Art is to Tie your ‘Ties’ and do not Nod to all ‘Nodes’.

As a user you are already targeted but be wise! Target the desirable social networking site on your own and for yourself. Privacy is neither entitled, nor granted. Privacy (whether it is online or offline, including ownership and control over the material) is simply given and it needs to be accepted. Though digital privacy has one step to be taken beforehand, as bizarre as it sounds, it needs to be chosen. Choose the right social networking site and enjoy your stand-in position.

Myth: Internet Governance - it is for you, of course, not for us, for Internet stakeholders!

Reality: Internet governance yes, it is a governance of internet stakeholders! No Accountability of ours and No Participation of yours!

The Art is to govern in two-sided manner since there are no governors without governed.  

As a user, you are considered to be involved but you are not. Now I appeal you ‘to be involved’ in the Internet governance with the expectation to make you ‘get involved’ and with hope that you will ‘be involved.’ No genuine social networking site would disapprove your participation; on the contrary, they are designed in a way to protect you and share responsibility, to provide you with the tools to find out your “customary”  desires and needs and finally, to act in a good faith in the very best of your interest. So, in this case also, choose the right social networking site and enjoy your stand-in position.

Myth: You are our precious user and digital friend.

Reality: You are our commercial gain!

The Art is to build the digital relationships as a two-way street.

Nobody argues that lucrative business is made up of profits. However, I do not want to be somebody’s bonus, I do want to be somebody’s bonus and at the same time receive my own from the same source. Although you are voluntarily self-publishing yourself on social networking sites, you must be viewed not only as a commercial gain for the social networking site, but the genuine one should give you the chance to monetize your digital assets, receive your profit.  That’s the clause which contents me as a user, gives me the feeling that I am considered to be a partner, relevantly a member of the ‘family’.  More to the point, social networking site needs to guarantee that you are the digital ‘identity’, not just a hypothetic digital friend. Asking for solution? Choose the right social networking site and enjoy your stand-in position!

P.s.  Dear readers, I modestly dare to point out that here is no ‘like’ button, no ‘share’ option, and with the greatest respect I would like to remind you of your recently lost unique ability to like and share the material provided without acquiring that delightful feeling of pressing a button.

©2011ninojajanidze all rights reserved

IPM In Georgia

http://www.elsa.ge/ipm/main.html

“Crime of XXI Century – Cybercrime”


The European Law Students' Association Tbilisi together with the Ministry of Justice and Tbilisi state University’s Self-government invites you to participate in the project “Crime of  XXI Century – Cybercrime”. Informational technologies are becoming more and more included in every activity of the state and its´ citizens. Most of the transactions are conducted with the help of such technologies. However there is lot of risks concerning such technologies. Project aims to raise students´ awareness of the issue.

Under this project will be held Public lectures on the issues:

Georgia and Cyber security, The Convention on Cybercrime of the Council of Europe.

Georgian Strategy of Cyber security, Security Mechanisms from Cybercrime,
Case law competition; Conference.